Many applications are network-centric. The value in such applications is collaboration enabled by software. Achieving such collaboration through programming and running network applications is challenging. It requires understanding and managing individually all of the diverse, interrelated, distributed pieces that comprise a network application. The distributed elements include, for example, web sites, databases, workflows, web services, electronic data information exchanges, etc. Each of the distributed elements is generally hosted or managed by numerous hosting services and service control managers that are specific to the particular distributed element. Running each of the different hosting services with different distributed elements in them is complex and costly.
Some existing systems use the concept of a container to abstract the operation of a single, atomic module of a distributed application. Other existing systems use a container to abstract the operation of a composite, non-distributed application. However, such existing systems do not aid in the overall management of diverse elements in a heterogeneous distributed application. For example, the existing systems fail to provide an abstraction or interface between the container and some external management system to configure and coordinate execution of distributed applications.